Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

SITUATED EMBODIED SEMANTICS AND CONNECTIONIST MODELING 191
results where the behavior of their net follows some of the steps in the learning
of language by children. However, as in all kinds of modeling, they are forced
to various kinds of simplifications. One is that they, as in another impressive
connectionist model of “grounding” — that of Dorffner (1989), stop at the
level of “single symbols”. The major conclusion from the research described
in this paper is that situated embodied semantics and other similar approaches
to meaning and language acquisition will stand or fall depending on whether
they can provide a satisfactory account of how “symbols”, or rather words, are
meaningfully combined.
Acknowledgments
Though I am not sure that any of the people that I would like to acknowledge
would readily associate themselves with “situated embodied semantics”, I feel
I need to do so anyway. If it hadn’t been for Terry Regier, who generously left
his system at my disposal and performed some of the experiments together with
me in Berkeley and Stockholm, there would not have been any connectionist
modeling to report on. Sarah Williams gave useful comments from a developmental
perspective, which was the first impetus for me to look more seriously
at child language acquisition - more so since this paper had taken form. Sven
Öhman provided the impulse for most of the reasoning about “creativity” and
was generally supportive despite disagreeing with my “solutions”.
I also thank to the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments
on form and content, which I have tried to address as best as I can, and to the
many people who read and commented on drafts of this, perhaps a bit
overedited, article.
Notes
1. It is controversial to what extent neural nets also display “brain-likeness” and can, thus,
help answer the question of how the mind is “embodied” also in the sense of “how it is
realized in the human brain”. I will not deal with this question, but I basically agree with
Sampson (1987) that “when models are as successful as connectionist models appear to
be in predicting observable human behavior, they establish a claim to our attention, even
if the mechanisms from which they are built seem a-priori entirely implausible” (ibid
:873).